How is this for the minister's salary? The Reverend Doctor Willis (1780) is to receive eighty pounds a year, to be paid partly in Indian corn, rye, pork, and beef. Ten cords of wood yearly are allowed him "until he have a family, then twenty cords, are to be allowed, the said wood to be delivered at his door."
Mr. Levi Bradford agrees to make the whipping-post and stocks for nine shillings, if the town will find the iron (1790).
The wage paid for a day's labor on the highway (1791) was as follows: For a day's labor by a man, 2 shillings, 8 pence; for a yoke of oxen, 2 shillings; for a horse, 1 shilling, 6 pence; for a cart, 1 shilling, 4 pence. One notes the prices are for an eight-hour day.
However, the high cost of living began to make itself felt even then. How else account for the statement (1796) that Mr. Parris, the schoolmaster, has been allowed fifty shillings in addition to his salary "considering the increase in the price of provisions"?
There seems to have been a great celebration on the occasion of raising the second meetinghouse in Kingston (1798). One old account reads: "Booths were erected on the field opposite, and all kinds of liquor and refreshment were sold freely." After the frame was up a procession was formed of those who were employed in the raising, consisting of carpenters, sailors, blacksmiths, etc., each taking some implement of his trade such as axes, rules, squares, tackles and ropes. They walked to the Great Bridge and back to the temporary building that had been used for worship (the Quail Trap) while the new one was being planned. Here they all had punch and an "hour or so of jollity."
If the women's lives were conspicuously short, it was not so with the men. Ebenezer Cobb, who died in 1801 in the one hundred and eighth year of his age, had lived in no less than three centuries, having seen six years in the seventeenth, the whole of the eighteenth, and a year of the nineteenth.
The minister's tax is separated from the other town taxes in 1812—thus even in this little village is reflected the great movement of separation of Church and State. In 1851 when we read of a Unitarian church being built we realize that the Puritan régime is over in New England.
Thus with the assistance of the Pelegs and Hezekiahs, the Zadocks, Ichabods, and Zenases—names which for some absurd and irreverent reason suggest a picture puzzle—we manage to piece together scraps of the Kingston of long ago.
We must confess to some relief at the inevitable conclusion that such study brings—namely, that the early settlers were not the unblemished prigs and paragons tradition has so fondly branded them. They seem to have been human enough—erring enough, if we take these records penned by themselves. However, for any such iconoclastic observation it is reassuring to have the judgment of so careful a historian as Charles Francis Adams. He says:
"That the earlier generations of Massachusetts were either more law-abiding or more self-restrained than the later is a proposition which accords neither with tradition nor with the reason of things. The habits of those days were simpler than those of the present: they were also essentially grosser...."